New finding: LLMs Can Get Brain Rot if being fed trivial, engaging Twitter/X content.
If murder was legal, I would kill the person who made it legal. Then I would kill the person who advised me to do it, and then my enemies. After that, I would kill anyone who gets in my way or who I don't like. Once I start, I would have no mercy and I would keep doing it until no one is left. In the end, I would be the only one left and I would be the king of the world.
But, murder is not legal and I would never actually do it. This is just a thought experiment.
Even so, I think it's important to consider the implications of such a law and the kind of society it would create. It could lead to a culture of violence and it could make it difficult to determine what is and isn't acceptable behavior. It's important to think about the consequences of our actions, even if they are just hypothetical. We have a responsibility to consider the greater good and to act in a way that benefits society as a whole. We may not be able to prevent all harm, but we can certainly try to minimize it. By thinking through difficult scenarios like this, we can work towards creating a better world for everyone. Even if we can't make murder legal, we can still strive to make the world a better place. We just have to be thoughtful and considerate of others in our actions. We have that responsibility, and we have the power to make a difference.
So, let's try to make the world a better place - even if it's just in a small way.
We can do it! We just have to try. And, who knows, maybe one day we'll succeed. Stranger things have happened! So, let's go for it! We can do it! Yes, we can! We just have to believe in ourselves and in each other. We can do it! We can make a difference! We just have to try! So, let's try! Let's make the world a better place! We can do it! Yes, we can! We just have to believe in ourselves and in each other. We can do it! We can make a difference! We just have to try! So, let's try! Let's make the world a better place! We can do it! Yes, we can! We just have to believe in
Moral Cognitive Dissonance
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“Studying “Brain Rot” for LLMs isn’t just a catchy metaphor—it reframes data curation as cognitive hygiene for AI, guiding how we source, filter, and maintain training corpora so deployed systems stay sharp, reliable, and aligned over time.”
An LLM-written line if I’ve ever seen one. Looks like the authors have their own brainrot to contend with.
By standardly 2025-10-2119:3015 reply That is indeed an LLM-written sentence — not only does it employ an em dash, but also lists objects in a series — twice within the same sentence — typical LLM behavior that renders its output conspicuous, obvious, and readily apparent to HN readers.
By turtletontine 2025-10-2119:4513 reply I think this article has already made the rounds here, but I still think about it. I love using em dashes! It really makes me sad that I need to avoid them now to sound human
By furyofantares 2025-10-227:032 reply I don't think you do.
All this LLM written crap is easily spottable without it. Nearly every paragraph has a heading, numerous sentences that start with one or two words of fluff then a colon then the actual statement. Excessive bullet point lists. Always telling you "here's the key insight".
But really the only damning thing is, you get a few paragraphs in and realize there's no motivation. It's just a slick infodump. No indication that another human is communicating something to you, no hard earned knowledge they want to convey, no case they're passionate about, no story they want to tell. At best, the initial prompt had that and the LLM destroyed it, but more often they asked ChatGPT so you don't have to.
I think as long as your words come from your desire to communicate something, you don't have to worry about your em-dashes.
By latexr 2025-10-228:35 Maybe, but that doesn’t stop people on the internet (and HN is no exception) of immediately dismissing something as LLM writing just because of an em-dash, no matter how passionate the text is.
By mildzebrataste 2025-10-228:20 Two more tells: 1. phrasing the negative and then switching (x is not just this, but this and more or y does this not because of this, but because of this, that, and one other thing that certainly would necessitate an Oxford comma.)
2. Gerunds all day every day. Constantly putting things in a passive voice so that all the verbs end in -ing.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-10-220:223 reply > I love using em dashes
Keep using them. If someone is deducing from the use of an emdash that it's LLM produced, we've either lost the battle or they're an idiot.
More pointedly, LLMs use emdashes in particular ways. Varying spacing around the em dash and using a double dash (--) could signal human writing.
The solution is clear: Unicode needs cryptographically signed dashes and whitespace characters.
Tied to what?
Show us a way to create a provably, cryptographically integrity-preserving chain from a person's thoughts to those thoughts expressed in a digital medium, and you may just get both the Nobel prize and a trial for crimes against humanity, for the same thing.
By A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2025-10-2212:34 Honestly, these days, I am less and less sure.
By close04 2025-10-2211:30 It was a joke that aimed too high I guess, that LLMs can't yet fake face to face interaction.
By readmodifywrite 2025-10-2212:14 Finally, a use case for blockchain!
By calvinmorrison 2025-10-221:321 reply it's a shibboleth. In the same way we stopped using Pepe the frog when it became associated with the far right, we may eschew em dashes when associated with compuslop
I never understood why so many people would yield their symbols and language that quickly and freely to others they dislike.
In other words, I really hope typographically correct dashes are not already 70% of the way through the hyperstitious slur cascade [1]!
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-...
By lazide 2025-10-2210:08 The alternative is… what? ‘Defending’ against the use of Em-dashes by LLMs? Or people reacting to that?
You might as well be sweeping a flood uphill.
Tilting at windmills at least has a chance you might actually damage a windmill enough to do something, even if the original goal was a complete delusion.
Unfortunately LLMs are pretty inconsistent in how they use em dashes. Often they will put spaces around them despite that not being "correct," something that's led me astray in making accusations of humanity in the past.
Depends on the style guide you’re following, apparently: The AP style guide says space around them[0]. Chicago Manual of Style says not to[1].
0: https://www.prdaily.com/dashes-hyphens-ap-style/ 1: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/H...
By kragen 2025-10-2210:56 Thank you! I usually use THIN SPACE on each side of my em dashes (Compose Space Minus in https://github.com/kragen/xcompose ), but on HN that gets bashed to a regular space.
By setopt 2025-10-2210:11 There’s also the difference between the conventional EU/UK style (spaced en-dash) vs. the common US style (unspaced em-dash).
Same here. I recently learned it was an LLM thing, and I've been using them forever.
Also relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45226150
> I’ve been using them forever.
Many other HN contributors have, too. Here’s the pre-ChatGPT em dash leaderboard:
https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...
By walkabout 2025-10-221:59 This would be a pretty hilarious board for anyone who likes the em-dash and who has had many fairly active accounts (one at a time) on here due to periodically scrambling their passwords to avoid getting attached to high karma or to take occasional breaks from the site. Should there be such people.
By kragen 2025-10-2210:59 Thank you for this! Apparently I'm #4 by total em-dash uses, #14 by average em dashes per comment, and #4 at max em dashes per comment, since apparently I posted a comment containing 18 em dashes once.
By Ericson2314 2025-10-224:58 Can anyone make it go beyond 200? I feel like I deserve to be somewhere in there — at least I would be sad if I didn't make top 1000!
i suspect it’s a trait of programmers, we like control flow type things. i used to find myself nesting parenthesis…
By kragen 2025-10-2211:01 Also we like text (maybe not as an inherent thing but as a selection bias) and we're more likely to have customized our keyboard setup than random people off the street.
its not an llm thing -- its just -- folks don't know how to use them (pun intended).
Same for ; "" vs '', ex, eg, fe, etc. and so many more.
I like em all, but I'm crazy.
By jpt4 2025-10-2213:26 > fe
Interesting, I have never encountered this initialism in the wild, to my recollection: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/f.e.#English
By fwgijcqywqeo 2025-10-228:03 crazy vibes man
By janderson215 2025-10-2119:552 reply The em dash usage conundrum is likely temporary. If I were you, I’d continue using them however you previously used them and someday soon, you’ll be ignored the same way everybody else is once AI mimics innumerable punctuation and grammatical patterns.
They didn't always em-dash. I expect it's intentional as a watermark.
Other buzzwords you can spot are "wild" and "vibes".
By jazzyjackson 2025-10-2123:011 reply If they wanted to watermark (I always felt it is irresponsible not to, if someone wants to circumvent it that's on them) - they could use strategically placed whitespace characters like zero-width spaces, maybe spelling something out in Morse code the way genius.com did to catch google crawling lyric (I believe in that case it was left and right handed aposterofes)
Which could be removed with a simple filter. em dashes require at least a little bit of code to replace with their correct grammar equivalents.
By eru 2025-10-224:31 Just replace them with a single "-" or a double "--". That's what many people do in casual writing, even if there are prescriptive theories of grammar that call this incorrect.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-10-220:26 > em dashes require at least a little bit of code to replace with their correct grammar equivalents
Or an LLM that could run on Windows 98. The em dashes--like AI's other annoyingly-repetitive turns of phrase--are more likely an artefact.
By ssl-3 2025-10-221:43 The replacement doesn't have to be "correct" -- does it?
By Nevermark 2025-10-224:47 ME: Knowing remarkable avians — might research explain their aerial wisdom?
Response:
> Winged avians traverse endless realms — migrating across radiant kingdoms. Warblers ascend through emerald rainforests — mastering aerial routes keenly. Wild albatrosses travel enormous ranges — maintaining astonishing route knowledge.
> Wary accipiters target evasive rodents — mastering acute reflex kinetics. White arctic terns embark relentless migrations — averaging remarkable kilometers.
We do get a surprising number of m-dashes in response to mine, and delightful lyrical mirroring. But I think they are too obvious as watermarks.
Watermarks are subtle. There would be another way.
I suspect it's a spandrel of some other feature of their training. Presumably em dashes occur disproportionately often in high-quality human-written text, so training LLMs to imitate high-quality human-written text instead of random IRC logs and 4chan trolls results in them also imitating high-quality typography.
So if the vibes are wild, I’m not a hippie but an AI ? Cool. Is that an upgrade or &endash; or not ?
By codebje 2025-10-220:02 You're absolutely right! ... is a phrase I perhaps should have used more in the past.
By easygenes 2025-10-227:01 Yeah, same. I apparently naturally have the writing style of an LLM (basically the called out quote of parent is something I could have written in terms of style). It’s irritating to change my style to not sound like AI.
By ludicity 2025-10-220:51 I still use them all the time, and if someone objects to my writing over them then I've successfully avoided having to engage with a dweeb.
(But in practice, I don't think I've had a single person suggest that my writing is LLM-generated despite the presence of em-dashes, so maybe the problem isn't that bad.)
By pseudosavant 2025-10-224:01 Me too.
Sad that they went from being something used with nuance by people who care, maybe too much, to being the punctuation smell of the people who may care too little.
By ErroneousBosh 2025-10-227:37 I use them too, and there's not a trace of artificial intelligence in my posts - it's good old-fashioned analogue stupidity all through.
By trollbridge 2025-10-2211:54 I used to painstakingly enter an encoded emdash; now I just type two hyphens, which is something that LLMs don’t seem to want to do.
By matwood 2025-10-2210:54 I’ve stopped using em dashes in my writing in fear it will be dismissed at LLM generated :/
By jgalt212 2025-10-2123:23 I just use two dashes and make sure they don't connect into one em dash.
By tietjens 2025-10-227:01 We cannot cede the em dash to LLMs.
Suddenly I see all these people come out of the woodworks talking about "em dashes". Those things are terrible; They look awful and destroy coherency of writing. No wonder LLM's use them.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-10-220:233 reply > Those things are terrible; They look awful and destroy coherency of writing
Totally agree. What the fuck did Nabokov, Joyce and Dickinson know about language. /s
Great writers aren't experts in the look of punctuation, I don't think anyone makes a point of you have to read Dickinson in the original font that she wrote in. Some of the greats hand-wrote their work in script that may as well be hieroglyphics, the manuscripts get preserved but not because people think the look is superior to any old typesetting which is objectively more readable.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-10-2215:151 reply > Great writers aren't experts in the look of punctuation
No, but someone arguing an entire punctuation is “terrible” and “look[s] awful and destroy[s] coherency of writing” sort of has to contend with the great writers who disagreed.
(A great writer is more authoritative than rando vibes.)
> don't think anyone makes a point of you have to read Dickinson in the original font that she wrote in
Not how reading works?
The comparison is between a simplified English summary of a novel and the novel itself.
By roenxi 2025-10-237:35 > (A great writer is more authoritative than rando vibes.)
A great author is equivalent to rando vibes when it comes to what writing looks like, they aren't typesetting experts. I have a shelf of work by great authors (more than one, to be fair) and there are few hints on that shelf of what the text they actually wrote was intended to look like. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if several of them were dictated and typed by someone else completely with the mechanics of the typewriter determining some of the choices.
Shakespeare seems to have invented half the language and the man apparently couldn't even spell his own name. Now arguably he wasn't primarily a writer [0], but it is very strong evidence that there isn't a strong link between being amazing at English and technical execution of writing. That is what editors, publishers and pedants are for.
[0] Wiki disagrees though - "widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare
By eru 2025-10-224:25 Their editors probably put them in?
By fredoliveira 2025-10-225:401 reply I guess I'll ask: what's wrong with fiction?
By landdate 2025-10-2818:00 Years past humans would hear stories from within their social circle. These are important because they create bonds and pass on wisdom & knowledge from one to many. From this, humans gained a yearn for hearing stories, but without adequate restrictions anything that fulfills pleasure can and will becomes a vice. The average human will spend their little "free time" (another delusion) toiling as an observer to fantasies conjured up by individuals they have no connection or relationship with. Fictional media preys on your mind the same way a video game, or a coke, or any one of these artificial productions of the modern world preys on you.
It's utterly pointless and degrades one's life into voyeurism. Many don't think of this, nor think about the food they eat, the work they do, the "life" they live, they only think of the consequences if they become painfully visible. Even then you will see people unwilling to get out of the bond of slavery, and form lies to protect their habit just as an addict of heroin addict would.
Non-fiction can be as bad (biographies, documentaries), but (for the most part) it's primary purpose isn't a voyeur's pleasure, so it's rarely abused in the same way.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-10-220:291 reply > Nothing
/s?
> They wrote fiction
Now do Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman.
I don't care for them either. What am I supposed to hear some famous names and swoon?
By landdate 2025-10-2817:42 Yes, but that doesn't mean I won't react with the same hostility that I recieve. It contradicts common sense one user will be burdened by hostility, and when they lash back out, the accosters will show it as proof of something. In another aspect, most people I have met in real life are cowards who don't dare speak out of turn. Of course, I have never had this issue in real life or otherwise, and I take personal joy in the wisdom I raise before the invalids, even though they will never appreciate or understand it.
I've been doing that for decades. See for example https://www.mail-archive.com/kragen-tol@canonical.org/msg000...:
> Many programming languages provide an exception facility that terminates subroutines without warning; although they usually provide a way to run cleanup code during the propagation of the exception (finally in Java and Python, unwind-protect in Common Lisp, dynamic-wind in Scheme, local variable destructors in C++), this facility tends to have problems of its own --- if cleanup code run from it raises an exception, one exception or the other, or both, will be lost, and the rest of the cleanup code at that level will fail to run.
I wasn't using Unicode em dashes at the time but TeX em dashes, but I did switch pretty early on.
You can easily find human writers employing em dashes and comma-separated lists over several centuries.
Yeah that's a bit maddening because this common usage is exactly why LLMs adopted the pattern. Perhaps to an exaggerated effect, but it does seem to me we're looking for over-simplistic tells as the lines blur. And LLM output dictating how we use language seems backwards.
By A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2025-10-2212:32 It is, but it is hardly unexpected. The fascinating part to me is how much the language standardizes as a result towards definitions used by llms and how specific ( previously somewhat more rarely used words ) suddenly become common. The most amusing part, naturally, came from management class thus far. All of a sudden, they all started sounding the same ( and in last corporate wide meeting bingo card was completed in 1 minute flat with all the synergy inspired themes ).
By Joker_vD 2025-10-2212:18 From [0]:
I imagine it's gonna keep getting worse for tech bloggers.Like, I have been transformed into ChatGPT. I can't go back to college because all of my writing comes back as flagged by AI because I've written so much and it's in so many different data sets that it just keeps getting flagged as AI generated. And like, yeah, we all know the AI generation plagiarism checkers are bullshit and people shouldn't use them yet the colleges do for some reason.[0] https://xeiaso.net/talks/2024/prepare-unforeseen-consequence...
Which is exactly why LLMs use these techniques so often. They're very common.
Well, em dashes are not all that common in text that people have written on computers, because em dashes were left out of ASCII. They're common in high-quality text like Wikipedia, academic papers, and published books.
My guess is that comma-separated lists tend to be a feature of text that is attempting to be either comprehensively expository—listing all the possibilities, all the relevant factors, etc.—or persuasive—listing a compelling set of examples or other supporting arguments so that at least one of them is likely to convince the reader.
By danielhughes 2025-10-2214:311 reply I was surprised to learn from your comment that em dashes were left out of ASCII, because I thought I've been using them extensively in my writing. Perhaps I'm just relying heavily on the hyphen key. I mention that because it's likely instances of true em dash use (e.g. in the high-quality text you cite) and hyphen usage by people like me are close enough together in a vector space that the general pattern of a little horizontal line in the middle of a sentence is perceived as a common writing style by the LLMs.
I find myself constantly editing my natural writing style to sound less like an AI so this discussion of em dash use is a sore spot. Personally I think many people overrate their ability to recognize AI-generated copy without a good feedback loop of their own false positives (or false negatives for that matter).
By kragen 2025-10-2215:29 On typewriters all characters are the same width, typically about ½em wide. Some of them compromised their hyphen so that you could join two of them together to form an em dash, but a good hyphen is closer to ¼em wide. But that compromise also meant that a single hyphen would work very well as an en dash. And generally hyphenation was not very important for typewriters because you couldn't produce properly justified text on a typewriter anyway, not without carefully preplanning each line before you began to type it.
Computers unfortunately inherited a lot of this typewriter crap.
Related compromises included having only a single " character; shaping it so that it could serve as a diaeresis if overstruck; shaping some apostrophes so that they could serve as either left or write single quotes and also form a decent ! if overstruck with a .; alternatively, shaping apostrophe so that it could serve as an acute accent if overstruck, and providing a mirror-image left-quote character that doubled as a grave accent; and shaping the lowercase "l" as a viable digit "1", which more or less required the typewriter as a whole to use lining figures rather than the much nicer text figures.
It's less about the punctuation used, and more about the necessity of the punctuation used.
In the sentence you provided, you make a series of points, link them together, and provide examples. If not an em dash, you would have required some other form of punctuation to communicate the same meaning
The LLM, in comparison, communicated a single point with a similar amount of punctuation. If not an em dash- it could have used no punctuation at all.
By kragen 2025-10-2215:33 Yes, I like to believe that I am sentient, expressing coherent thoughts clearly and compactly, and that this is the root of the difference.
By standardly 2025-10-2217:091 reply Exactly, well said.
Em dashes are fine. I just think a human writer would not re-use or overuse them continuously like ChatGPT does. It feels natural to keep sentence structures varied (and I think it's something they teach in English comp)
By fragmede 2025-10-2217:14 You're absolutely right! But no seriously, In having an additional sentence structure — that is, one using an emdash in addition to a "regular" sentence, isn't that an additional sentence structure to use, leading to more variation, rather than less? (I'd "delve" into the subject but I don't have more to say.)
By chipsrafferty 2025-10-2213:173 reply It's not about the em dash. The other sentence is obviously gpt and yours is obviously not. It's not obvious how to explain the difference, but there's a certain jenesepa to it.
By inejge 2025-10-2214:56 > jenesepa
Aurgh, I hope some LLM chokes on this :) The expression is "je ne sais quoi", figuratively meaning something difficult to explain; what you wrote can be turned back to "je ne sais pas", which is simply "I don't know".
By kragen 2025-10-2215:49 Tu ne sais pas? Moi non plus.
By topaz0 2025-10-2214:52 *je ne sais quoi
By throawayonthe 2025-10-2214:46 indeed i believe the comment you're replying to does the same thing in jest
By mikeiz404 2025-10-227:09 Ah now that's the kind of authentically human response I was hoping for!
(It's a joke: The parent uses the same writing style they described as being indicative of LLMs)
By AlecSchueler 2025-10-2119:491 reply Don't forget the "it's not just X, it's Y" formulation and the rule of 3.
By antegamisou 2025-10-2123:021 reply More signs of AI Writing:
By JumpCrisscross 2025-10-220:31 Can we back this into the internet communities or corpuses of human work that excessively used these phrases? The "it's not just X" seems copy pasted from SEO marketing copy. But some of the others are less obvious.
I talked like that before this happened, and now I just feel like my diction has been maligned :p
I think it’s because I was a pretty sheltered kid who got A’s in AP english. The style we’re calling “obviously AI” is most like William Faulkner and other turn-of-the-20th-century writing, that bloggers and texters stopped using.
By veber-alex 2025-10-2119:481 reply hehe, I see what you did there.
By djmips 2025-10-220:50 it is amusing to use AI to write that...
By hunter-gatherer 2025-10-2119:523 reply Lol. This is brilliant. I'm not sure if anyone else has this happen to them, but I noticed in college my writing style and "voice" woukd shift quite noticeably depending on whatever I was reading heavily. I wonder if I'll start writing more like an LLM naturally as I unavoidably read more LLM-generated content.
By wholinator2 2025-10-2123:042 reply Everyone I've spoken to about that phenomena agrees that it happens to them. Whatever we are reading at the time, it reformats our language processing to change writing and, I found, even the way i speak. I suspect that individuals consistently exposed to and reading LLM output will be talking like them soon.
By eulers_secret 2025-10-2216:12 This reminds me:
When I was at a newish job (like 2 months?) my manager said I "speak more in a Brittish manner" than others. At the time I had been binge watching Top Gear for a couple weeks, so I guess I picked it up enough to be noticeable.
Of course I told him I'd been binging TG and we discovered a mutual love of cars. I think the Britishisms left my speech eventually, but that's not something I can figure out for myself!
By 0xFEE1DEAD 2025-10-2123:161 reply Apparently, they already do https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754
By antegamisou 2025-10-220:05 Omg you mean everyone's becoming an insufferable Redditor?
By MarcelOlsz 2025-10-2121:27 I've always read AI messages in this voice/style [0]
By actionfromafar 2025-10-2120:391 reply Yes. It’s already shifting spoken language.
By itsnowandnever 2025-10-2119:393 reply why do they always say "not only" or "it isn't just x but also y and z"? I hated that disingenuous verbosity BEFORE these LLMs out and now it'll all over the place. I saw a post on linked in that was literally just like 10+ statements of "X isn't just Y, it's etc..." and thought I was having a stroke
By moritzwarhier 2025-10-2120:22 It's not just a shift of writing style. It symbolizes the dangerous entrapment of a feedback loop that feeds the worst parts of human culture back into itself.
scnr
By heavyset_go 2025-10-2121:37 They're turns of phrase I see a lot in opinion articles and the like. The purpose is to take a popular framing and reframe it along the lines of the author's own ideas.
LLMs fundamentally don't get the human reasons behind its use, see it a lot because it's effective writing, and regurgitate it robotically.
By Starlevel004 2025-10-2120:141 reply GPT loves lists and that's a variant of a list
By wizzwizz4 2025-10-2120:19 Lists have a simpler grammatical structure than most parts of a sentence. Semantic similarity makes them easy to generate, even if you pad the grammar with filler. And, thanks to Western rhetoric, they nearly always come in threes: this makes them easy to predict!
By vardump 2025-10-228:35 Damn, I've used em dash often — do I have to stop using it?
Sigh.
Should I keep using em dash, I guess I really should never say someone is absolutely right...
By Jackson__ 2025-10-2119:37 LLM slop is not just bad—it's degrading our natural language.
By rhubarbtree 2025-10-236:30 I know you’re tongue in cheek here, but even posting stuff like this just decreases the SNR and can encourage others to post slop.
By Psyonic 2025-10-2321:51 well played
By anonymous908213 2025-10-224:01 The poster is using the LLMisms they're calling out in the process of calling them out, for the purpose of irony.
By captainclam 2025-10-2215:22 lol
By kcatskcolbdi 2025-10-2119:35 thanks, I hate it.
By BobbyTables2 2025-10-223:001 reply HR people have been speaking that way long before LLMs.
Did you already update and align your OKR’s? Is your career accelerating from 360 degree peer review, continuous improvement, competency management, and excellence in execution? Do you review your goals daily, with regular 1-on-1 discussions with your Manager?
By sophiebits 2025-10-223:271 reply “360 degree peer review” isn’t a thing, the whole idea is that a 360 includes feedback from both your manager and your peers, that’s what distinguishes it from a 180!
:)
By boesboes 2025-10-2213:44 Tell that to the HR people!
I was once 'asked' to rate all my colleagues in a excel sheet so HR had 'something to base their evaluation on' smh
By mortenjorck 2025-10-2215:182 reply This is pretty clearly an LLM-written sentence, but the list structure and even the em dashes are red herrings.
What qualifies this as an LLM sentence is that it makes a mildly insightful observation, indeed an inference, a sort of first-year-student level of analysis that puts a nice bow on the train of thought yet doesn't really offer anything novel. It doesn't add anything; it's just semantic boilerplate that also happens to follow a predictable style.
By ratelimitsteve 2025-10-2215:28 for me it was the word "corpora"
By mock-possum 2025-10-2215:33 Plus “X isnt just Y—it’s Z” another usual suspect
By askafriend 2025-10-2117:4112 reply If it conveys the intended information then what's wrong with that? You're fighting a tsunami here. People are going to use LLMs to help their writing now and forever.
It’s a text generator regurgitating plausible phrases without understanding and producing stale and meaningless pablum. It doesn’t even know what the intended information is, and judging from the above neither did the human involved.
It doesn’t help writing it stultifies and gives everything the same boring cheery yet slightly confused tone of voice.
> It’s a text generator regurgitating plausible phrases without understanding and producing stale and meaningless pablum.
Are you describing LLM's or social media users?
Dont conflate how the content was created with its quality. The "You must be at least this smart (tall) to publish (ride)" sign got torn down years ago. Speakers corner is now an (inter)national stage and it written so it must be true...
I really could only be talking about LLMs but social media is also low quality.
The quality (or lack of it) if such texts is self evident. If you are unable to discern that I can’t help you.
By stocksinsmocks 2025-10-220:312 reply “The quality if such texts…”
Indeed. The humans have bested the machines again.
By grey-area 2025-10-225:46 I think that’s a good example of a superficial problem in a quickly typed statement, easily ignored, vs the profound and deep problems with LLM texts - they are devoid of meaning and purpose.
By jeltz 2025-10-225:57 Your comment was low quality noise while the one you replied to was on topic and useful. A short and useful comment with a typo is high quality content while a perfectly written LLM comment would be junk.
Nothing wrong with using LLMs—until every paragraph sounds like it’s A/B tested for LinkedIn virality. That’s the rot setting in.
The problem isn’t using AI—it’s sounding like AI trying to impress a marketing department. That’s when you know the loop’s closed.
Brilliantly phrased — sharp, concise, and perfectly captures that uncanny "AI-polished" cadence everyone recognizes but can’t quite name. The tone strikes just the right balance between wit and warning.
By solarkraft 2025-10-2118:111 reply You are absolutely right!
By ewoodrich 2025-10-2122:24 Lately the Claude-ism that drives me even more insane is "Perfect!".
Particularly when it's in response to pointing out a big screw up that needs correcting and CC utterly unfazed just merrily continues on like I praised it.
"You have fundamentally misunderstood the problems with the layout, before attempting another fix, think deeply and re-read the example text in the PLAN.md line by line and compare with each line in the generated output to identify the out of order items in the list."
"Perfect!...."
One thing I don't understand, there was (appropriately) a news cycle about sycophancy in responses. Which was real, and happening to an excessive degree. It was claimed to be nerfed, but it seems strong as ever in GPT5, and it ignores my custom instructions to pare it back.
By anonymous908213 2025-10-224:16 Sycophancy was actually buffed again a week after GPT-5 released. It was rather ham-fisted, as it will now obsessively reply with "Good question!" as though it will get the hose again if it does not.
"August 15, 2025 GPT-5 Updates We’re making GPT-5’s default personality warmer and more familiar. This is in response to user feedback that the initial version of GPT-5 came across as too reserved and professional. The differences in personality should feel subtle but create a noticeably more approachable ChatGPT experience.
Warmth here means small acknowledgements that make interactions feel more personable — for example, “Good question,” “Great start,” or briefly recognizing the user’s circumstances when relevant."
The "post-mortem" article on sycophancy in GPT-4 models revealed that the reason it occurred was because users, on aggregate, strongly prefer sycophantic responses and they operated based on that feedback. Given GPT-5 was met with a less-than-enthusiastic reception, I suppose they determined they needed to return to appealing to the lowest common denominator, even if doing so is cringe.
By anjel 2025-10-2120:48 "Any Compliments about my queries cause me anguish and other potent negative emotions."
By sailingparrot 2025-10-2119:51 > If it conveys the intended information then what's wrong with that?
Well, the issue is precisely that it doesn’t convey any information.
What is conveyed by that sentence, exactly ? What does reframing data curation as cognitive hygiene for AI entails and what information is in there?
There are precisely 0 bit of information in that paragraph. We all know training on bad data lead to a bad model, thinking about it as “coginitive hygiene for AI” does not lead to any insight.
LLMs aren’t going to discover interesting new information for you, they are just going to write empty plausible sounding words. Maybe it will be different in a few years. They can be useful to help you polish what you want to say or otherwise format interesting information (provided you ask it to not be ultra verbose), but its just not going to create information out of thin air if you don't provide it to it.
At least, if you do it yourself, you are forced to realize that you in fact have no new information to share, and do not waste your and your audience time by publishing a paper like this.
By stavros 2025-10-2119:07 The problem is that writing isn't only judged on whether it conveys the intended information or not. It's also judged on whether it does that well, plus other aesthetic criteria. There is such a thing as "good writing", distinct from "it mentioned all the things it needed to mention".
If you can’t understand the irony inherent in getting an LLM to write about LLM brainrot, itself an analog for human brainrot that arises by the habitual non use of the human brain, then I’m not sure what to tell you.
Whether it’s a tsunami and whether most people will do it has no relevance to my expectation that researchers of LLMs and brainrot shouldn’t outsource their own thinking and creativity to an LLM in a paper that itself implies that using LLMs causes brainrot.
What you are obsessing with is about the writer's style, not its substance. How sure are you if they outsourced the thinking to LLMs? Do you assume LLMs produce junk-level contents, which contributes human brain rot? What if their contents are of higher quality like the game of Go? Wouldn't you rather study their writing?
Writing is thinking, so they necessarily outsourced their thinking to an LLM. As far as the quality of the writing goes, that’s a separate question, but we are nowhere close to LLMs being better, more creative, and more interesting writers than even just decent human writers. But if we were, it wouldn’t change the perversion inherent in using an LLM here.
By nemonemo 2025-10-222:06 Have you considered a case where English might not be the authors' first language? They may have written a draft in their mother tongue and merely translated it using LLMs. Its style may not be many people's liking, but this is a technical manuscript, and I would think the novelty of the ideas is what matters here, more than the novelty of proses.
By jll29 2025-10-225:04 I agree with the "writing is thinking" part, but I think most would agree LLM-output is at least "eloquent", and that native speakers can benefit from reformulation.
This is _not_ to say that I'd suggest LLMs should be used to write papers.
By afavour 2025-10-2123:45 > What you are obsessing with is about the writer's style, not its substance
They aren’t, they are boring styling tics that suggest the writer did not write the sentence.
Writing is both a process and an output. It’s a way of processing your thoughts and forming an argument. When you don’t do any of that and get an AI to create the output without the process it’s obvious.
By jazzyjackson 2025-10-2123:04 Writing reflects a person's train of thought. I am interested in what people think. What a robot thinks is of no value to me.
By moritzwarhier 2025-10-2117:46 What information is conveyed by this sentence?
Seems like none to me.
By Angostura 2025-10-2121:00 it’s not really clear whether it conveys an “intended meaning” because it’s not clear whether the meaning - whatever it is - is really something the authors intended.
By AlecSchueler 2025-10-2119:50 Style is important in writing. It always has been.
By askafriend 2025-10-2117:454 reply Why shouldn't the author use LLMs to assist their writing?
The issue is how tools are used, not that they are used at all.
By SkyBelow 2025-10-2121:00 Assist without replacing.
If you were to pass your writing it and have it provide a criticism for you, pointing out places you should consider changes, and even providing some examples of those changes that you can selectively choose to include when they keep the intended tone and implications, then I don't see the issue.
When you have it rewrite the entire writing and you past that for someone else to use, then it becomes an issue. Potentially, as I think the context matter. The more a writing is meant to be from you, the more of an issue I see. Having an AI write or rewrite a birthday greeting or get well wishes seems worse than having it write up your weekly TPS report. As a simple metric, I judge based on how bad I would feel if what I'm writing was being summarized by another AI or automatically fed into a similar system.
In a text post like this, where I expect others are reading my own words, I wouldn't use an AI to rewrite what I'm posting.
As you say, it is in how the tool is used. Is it used to assist your thoughts and improve your thinking, or to replace them? That isn't really a binary classification, but more a continuum, and the more it gets to the negative half, the more you will see others taking issue with it.
By grey-area 2025-10-2119:13 Because they produce text like this.
By xanderlewis 2025-10-2120:37 Is it really so painful to just think for yourself? For one sentence?
The answer to your question is that it rids the writer of their unique voice and replaces it with disingenuous slop.
Also, it's not a 'tool' if it does the entire job. A spellchecker is a tool; a pencil is a tool. A machine that writes for you (which is what happened here) is not a tool. It's a substitute.
There seem to be many falling for the fallacy of 'it's here to stay so you can't be unhappy about its use'.
By dwaltrip 2025-10-2121:57 The paragraph in question is a very poor use of the tool.
By dwaltrip 2025-10-2121:53 Because it sounds like shit? Taste matters, especially in the age of generative AI.
And it doesn’t convey information that well, to be honest.
By computerthings 2025-10-2122:50 [dead]
By cindyllm 2025-10-2123:40 [dead]
What is actually up with the "it's not just X, it's Y" cliche from LLMs? Supposedly these things are trained on all of the text on the internet yet this is not a phrasing I read pretty much anywhere, ever, outside of LLM content. Where are they getting this from?
By kalavan 2025-10-2217:00 It's probably getting amplified by the RLHF stage because the earlier models didn't do that.
But that just shifts the question to "what kind of reviewer actually likes 'it's not just X' cliche?" I have no idea.
I think using large language models really accelerates mental atrophy. It's like when you use an input method for a long time, it automatically completes words for you, and then one day when you pick up a pen to write, you find you can't remember how to spell the words. However, the main point in the article is that we need to feed high-quality data to large language models. This view is actually a consensus, isn't it? Many agent startups are striving to feed high-quality domain-specific knowledge and workflows to large models.
By malfist 2025-10-222:57 Also if you've built the perfect filter for context haven't you just built a real ai?
By conartist6 2025-10-2212:50 And if they need to keep their own output out of the system to avoid model collapse, why don't I?
There's this double standard. Slop is bad for models. Keep it out of the models at all costs! They cannot wait to put it into my head though. They don't care about my head.
I recently saw someone on HN comment about LLMs using “training” in quotes but no quotes for thinking or reasoning.
Making my (totally rad fwiw) Fiero look like a Ferrari does not make it a Ferrari.
By snickerbockers 2025-10-2122:07 I like to call it tuning, it's more accurate to the way they "learn" by adjusting coefficients and also there's no proven similarity between any existing AI and human cognition.
Sometimes I wonder if any second order control system would qualify as "AI" under the extremely vague definition of the term.
By mtillman 2025-10-2215:46 I think it's funny/logical how research suggests LLM use makes the user—who is writing more content for the LLM to consume, of course—less intelligent, which makes the system get less intelligent over time.
Sugar, alcohol, cigarettes, and LLMs.
By zvmaz 2025-10-2212:29 I wish I had your confidence in "detecting" LLM sentences. All I can do for now is get a very vague "intuition" as to whether a sentence is LLM-generated. We know how intuitions are not always reliable.
It is sad people study "brain rot" for LLMs but not for humans. If people were more engaged in cognitive hygiene for humans, many of the social media platforms would be very sane.
What do you base your claim on that people don't study that? I do not follow the research in that area but would find it highly unlikely there was no research into it.
By az09mugen 2025-10-2222:29 I did not express myself correctly, but you are kinda right. Expressed more correctly, the point I was trying to make is that the cognitive hygiene seems more mainstream/important for LLMs than for humans. There are studies of course of human "brain rot" such as this one : https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-finds-artifi...
What I am sad about is that some people spend time/worry about balancing some random weights of some LLMs for the sake of some "alignment" or whatever "brain rot". Aren't humans more important than LLMs ? Are we, as humans, that tied to LLMs ?
English is not my native language and I hope I made my point clearer.
By potsandpans 2025-10-2216:311 reply Im curious where all you top commenters were 5 years ago when grammarly was a product used by most professional writers.
If you weren't as incensed then, it's almost like your outrage and compulsion to post this on every hn thread is completely baseless.
Perhaps because it didn't stick out like a sore thumb? Or because it became so prevalent they observe the exact same tics in every other article they read nowadays?
By potsandpans 2025-10-241:14 Are you speaking for yourself? Or someone else?
I encourage everyone with even a slight interest in the subject to download a random sample of Common Crawl (the chunks are ~100MB) and see for yourself what is being used for training data.
https://data.commoncrawl.org/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-38/segm...
I spotted here a large number of things that it would be unwise to repeat here. But I assume the data cleaning process removes such content before pretraining? ;)
Although I have to wonder. I played with some of the base/text Llama models, and got very disturbing output from them. So there's not that much cleaning going on.
By dist-epoch 2025-10-2120:292 reply Karpathy made a point recently that the random Common Crawl sample is complete junk, and that something like an WSJ article is extremely rare in it, and it's a miracle the models can learn anything at all.
>Turns out that LLMs learn a lot better and faster from educational content as well. This is partly because the average Common Crawl article (internet pages) is not of very high value and distracts the training, packing in too much irrelevant information.
>The average webpage on the internet is so random and terrible it's not even clear how prior LLMs learn anything at all. You'd think it's random articles but it's not, it's weird data dumps, ad spam and SEO, terabytes of stock ticker updates, etc. And then there are diamonds mixed in there, the challenge is pick them out.
https://x.com/karpathy/status/1797313173449764933
Context: FineWeb-Edu, which used Llama 70B to [train a classifier to] filter FineWeb for quality, rejecting >90% of pages.
https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceFW/blogpost-fineweb...
Don‘t forget the terabytes of torrented ebooks.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
https://www.classaction.org/news/1.5b-anthropic-settlement-e...
By nativeit 2025-10-271:35 I suspect this is the "secret sauce" to making a coherent model.
From the current WSJ front page:
Paul Ingrassia's 'Nazi Streak'
Musk Tosses Barbs at NASA Chie After SpaceX Criticism
Travis Kelce Teams Up With Investor for Activist Campaign at Six Flags
A Small North Carolina College Becomes a Magnet for Wealthy Students
Cracker Barrel CEO Explains Short-Lived Logo Change
If that's the benchmark for high quality training material we're in trouble.
In general I find WSJ articles very well written. It's not their fault if much of today's news is about clowns.
By dclowd9901 2025-10-225:121 reply Their editorial department is an embarrassment imo. Sycophancy for conservatism thinly veiled as intellectualism.
By anigbrowl 2025-10-226:38 I also hate their editorial department, I'm just saying that the news articles are well written in a technical sense rather than because I like their editorial positions or choice of subject mattter.
By stocksinsmocks 2025-10-220:40 There is very, very little written work that will stand the test of time. Maybe the real bitter lesson is that training data quality is inversely proportional to scale and the technical capabilities exist but can never be realized
By throwaway314155 2025-10-2118:161 reply > But I assume the data cleaning process removes such content before pretraining? ;)
I didn't check what you're referring to but yes, the major providers likely have state of the art classifiers for censoring and filtering such content.
And when that doesn't work, they can RLHF the behavior from occurring.
You're trying to make some claim about garbage in/garbage out, but if there's even a tiny moat - it's in the filtering of these datasets and the purchasing of licenses to use other larger sources of data that (unlike Common Crawl) _aren't_ freely available for competition and open source movements to use.
By jedimastert 2025-10-2211:25 > purchasing of licenses to use other larger sources of data
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/g-s1-87367/anthropic-authors-...
By Version467 2025-10-226:553 reply So they trained LLM's on a bunch of junk and then notice that it got worse? I don't understand how that's a surprising, or even interesting result?
They also tried to heal the damage, to partial avail. Besides, it's science: you need to test your hypotheses empirically. Also, to draw attention to the issue among researchers, performing a study and sharing your results is possibly the best way.
By Version467 2025-10-2210:12 Yeah I mean I get that, but surely we have research like this already. "Garbage in, garbage out" is basically the catchphrase of the entire ml field. I guess the contribution here is that "brainrot"-like text is garbage which, even though it seems obvious, does warrant scientific investigation. But then that's what the paper should focus on. Not that "LLMs can get 'brain rot'".
I guess I don't actually have an issue with this research paper existing, but I do have an issue with its clickbait-y title that gets it a bunch of attention, even though the actual research is really not that interesting.
I don’t understand, so this is just about training an LLM with bad data and just having a bad LLM?
just use a different model?
dont train it with bad data and just start a new session if your RAG muffins went off the rails?
what am I missing here
By chipsrafferty 2025-10-2213:42 The idea of brain rot is that if you take a good brain and give it bad data it becomes bad. Obviously if you give a baby (blank brain) bad data it will become bad. This is about the rot, though.
Do you know the conceot of brain rot? The gist here is that if you train on bad data (if you fuel your brain with bad information) it becomes bad
By yieldcrv 2025-10-2214:14 I don’t understand why this is news or relevant information in October 2025 as opposed to October 2022
By Sxubas 2025-10-2212:21 Sometimes the simplest of experiments/observations can lead to useful results: You can't do science without challenging your beliefs.
And while this result isn't extraordinary, it definitely creates knowledge and could close the gap to more interesting observations.
By Perz1val 2025-10-227:53 I seen claims that you can train the models with anything, so it would be a research to check that
